We know that one of the biggest problems facing humanity in this century is climate change. The rise in average global temperatures is causing alterations in the climate worldwide. The consequences could be catastrophic and must be avoided at all costs. Geoengineering has been developed for this purpose . Many people don't know what geoengineering is or what it aims to do.
Therefore, in this article we are going to tell you what geoengineering is, what are its characteristics, objectives and much more.
What is geoengineering
Geoengineering refers to a set of technologies designed for climate intervention in an attempt to "remedy" climate change. This discipline aspires to be a technology on a planetary scale.
Currently, science faces two challenges: absorbing carbon dioxide from the air so the atmosphere traps less heat, and reflecting more sunlight so the Earth absorbs less heat. In this context, geoengineering to cool the planet is presented as an option, although its effectiveness is the subject of much debate.
This developing discipline has already led some researchers to investigate, through computer simulations or small-scale laboratory experiments, the contributions that the development of geoengineering will bring, as well as the risks it may bring.
This profession combines the fields of knowledge of engineering, geography, and computer science, which is why it is a science that has always been debated in terms of the scope of its intervention.
Key features
One of the riskiest approaches to climate change is geoengineering, a concept encompassing various technical proposals for manipulating the global climate to address some of the symptoms of climate chaos. It carries environmental, social, and geopolitical risks, but the greatest immediate risk is that it will become an excuse for climate inaction: it is used as justification for continuing and increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions , and it promises that future technologies will exist to eliminate them or reduce temperatures.
It's an empty promise, since the vast majority of these ideas are purely theoretical, and the few that are even minimally developed in practice are prototypes or simply don't work for various reasons. In the context of climate change , they will in no way be developed on a commercial or global scale to have a significant impact on warming.
However, geoengineering proposals are very attractive to polluting industries that contribute to high greenhouse gas emissions, such as fossil fuels, mining, transportation, automotive, agribusiness, and others, and to the host countries of the large corporations that dominate these industries. They appear to be a hypothetical technological “solution” that would allow polluting activities to continue without facing the fundamental changes required in production and consumption patterns. At the same time, they open up new resources and opportunities for trade, development, and extraction.
Essentially, they are a way to create a large global captive market: the causes of climate change persist, so the climate crisis continues to intensify , so selling technologies to control the symptoms, if they work, opens up a world that, once started, cannot be stopped, mostly funded by states. The push for the misleading concept of "net zero"—offsetting emissions rather than reducing them—also provides a platform for geoengineering as a technological "solution."
Geoengineering proposals
Geoengineering techniques generally fall into three broad categories: those intended for the removal of carbon dioxide; those that try to reflect part of the solar radiation in space to reduce temperatures and those of local climate modification, to cause or avoid rain, hail, etc.
Currently, there are approximately 25-30 geoengineering proposals across these three categories , all aiming to manipulate terrestrial, marine, and/or atmospheric ecosystems. However, none of them attempt to address or modify the causes of climate change, but rather to manage some of its symptoms.
Among the proposed technologies are some that suggest injecting sulfates or other chemicals into the stratosphere to block sunlight , thus reducing the radiation that reaches Earth; bleaching or illuminating ocean clouds so they reflect more sunlight back into space; developing facilities to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and burying it in oil wells or other geological formations on land and in the oceans; fertilizing the oceans with iron or urea to stimulate rapid plankton growth in the hope that it will absorb more carbon dioxide and sink to the ocean floor; changing the chemistry of the oceans with pulverized rocks to make them more alkaline; and planting large tracts of genetically modified trees or crops that are said to absorb more carbon or reflect more sunlight.
Can it really help fight climate change?
By far the most common proposals involve carbon removal and storage. Carbon capture and storage (CCS), an old oil industry technique used to access deep hydrocarbon reserves, paradoxically extracts more oil, leading to more greenhouse gas emissions.
Proposals based on this technology, such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), involve cultivating vast plantations of trees or crops and then harvesting/burning them to produce "bioenergy," which is then combined with CCS to capture the carbon emissions from production. Similarly, direct air capture (DAC) uses, for example, large fan units to filter the air and separate the CO2 with chemical solvents. CCS then either buries the carbon or reuses it for different products, so that sooner or later the CO2 returns to the atmosphere; therefore, it should not be called "storage." The fossil fuel industry has a strong interest in all these technologies and makes the majority of the investments in these initiatives.
More recently, proponents of geoengineering have attempted to distance themselves from the term "geoengineering," either by proposing the technology alone or by stating that carbon dioxide removal technologies are so different from solar geoengineering technologies that they must be considered separately. While these technologies are really different from each other, what they all have in common is that they all propose large-scale technological manipulation of the weather.
Naming them individually is a way of avoiding consideration of their greater regional or global impact, avoiding the necessary analysis of the synergistic effects that arise from the simultaneous application of several of these technologies, and most importantly, avoiding community and public generalization, from the very beginning realizing that these are high-risk technologies.
I hope that with this information you can learn more about what geoengineering is and its characteristics.